Yesterday, an undergraduate emailed me to ask for book recommendations about the overlap between economics and philosophy. I recommended:
Amartya Sen The Idea of Justice
Michael Sandel What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
Agnar Sandmo Economics Evolving
and
D M Hausman and M S McPherson and D Satz Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy
Then I asked Twitter, and here is the resulting, much longer, list. [snipped]
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I have not read any of these. I have read some on the longer list. Thinking of the most lively reads, and trying to include left, right, and center, I would recommend:
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner.
Radicals for Capitalism, by Brian Doherty.
Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Muller.
If I were teaching an undergraduate course in philosophy and economics, I would include as articles
Hayek’s “The Pretense of Knowledge”
McCloskey’s “Why I am no longer a Positivist”
Leamer’s “Let’s take the Con out of Econometrics”
my own “How Effective is Economic Theory?”
In my view, there are two issues at the center of the overlap between economics and philosophy.
1. What methods best serve economics? In particular, what are the pros and cons of treating economics as a science?
2. How do markets fit in to the moral universe? What problems do they address? What problems do they cause?
The essays on my list deal primarily with the epistemological issue. The books on my list deal mostly with the moral issue.
The first chapters in Mises Human Action are the philosophical foundation for economics.
ssh! Here be dragons.
What are the philosophical difference between studying an ant farm vs a human society?
The main difference is that the researcher is a human, not an ant. And that leads us to the conclusion that economics should’t exist; it is simply the study of a researchers bias. Instead become a biologist or a statistician or political scientist.
Anthropology and sociology shouldn’t exist?
Ant Farms?
One read William Hamilton and Robert Trivers and ponder the likelihood that what works among the social insects will not work among any primates, including us.
Correction: “One should read” Hamilton and Trivers.
Re: McCloskey’s “Why I am no longer a Positivist”
I’ve found that, while logical positivism is self-negating as a statement of truth, it is usually a pretty good guide to determining which sorts of arguments are likely to be resolvable by appeal to evidence and which are likely to continue endlessly without resolution.
Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same: They are no more than duty to oneself.
As for method: Economics will turn into what it once was, with Smith and Hume, which is to say something glittering and deep, once the sense and taste of the logic of the market is seen more akin to that of the grammar of the language.
Tiny bit surprised you didnt choose Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
About 30 years Deirdre (then Donald) McCloskey handed out a very short list to the Price Theory class at Iowa. This was probably for people smart enough to take a graduate course in economics, but who were not going to study economics at the graduate level or get MBAs, either.
The list was not quite for what Prof. Arnold is talking about–it was more “how to actually learn what good economics and economic history looks like,” rather than either (1) remain ignorant, or (2) be misled and misinformed without really knowing it.
Things on the list that are still of significance might be
1. Nozick’s _Anarchy, state, and utopia_
2. Rawls _Theory of Justice_ (as a countering book to Nozick above)
3. Milton Friedman’s _Capitalism and Freedom_ (this does not become dated easily, I’d guess. It’s probably less dated than _Free to choose_ which is a newer book. )
4. Something by Theodore W. Schultz. _Transforming traditional agriculture_ was on the list, and I think it’s still worth reading for people thinking about the rural poor in developing countries)
5. Albert O. Hirschman’s _Exit, voice, and loyalty_
6. Fogel and Engerman’s _Time on the cross_.
There were a few other books that might not be at the top of the list now, including _The harried leisure class_ and _the uneasy case for progressive taxation_ (this last I’ve still not ever laid eyes on).
A caution on the list was to “avoid books currently fashionable in the Wall Street Journal or business magazines.”
My thoughts on Adam Smith:
Since you can get a nice copy of the Theory of Moral Sentiments from Liberty Press for cheap, there’s no need to leave that off the list. Adam Smith is still worth reading, though I recall Deirdre McCloskey mentioning that if you read all ca. 1000 pages of the _Wealth of Nations_ you end up making your way through about 100 pages about historical fluctuations in the price of silver.
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Another comment from Deirdre is that we don’t really know how to make first rate scholars, but we can repeatedly make people look at first rate scholarly works and hope they catch on. Allow me to channel her: “You see? You see? This is what a good work looks like!” For example, Fogel’s examination of Railroads in American Economic Growth (listed on an EH.Net list of classics in economic history, published in 1964)
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There’s a challenge compiling these lists because of this:
1. There are significant books 200+ years old, such as _Theory of moral sentiments_. I’m not sure when this time window ends. And when does it start? Do we put Aristotle on the list?
2. there are books in the 25 to 60 years old class–they’ve held up well, and they are probably still worth looking at. Fogel’s book on railroads is from 1964. Coase’s theory of the Firm, a short article, is probably from the 1930s!
3. There are things that scholars talk about now–this year–this list is up to date and also has a “recency bias” as scholars tend to focus on what’s current.
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Allow me to end with a comment about history and human nature. Philosophy and Ethics seem to be drive analysis in one direction–history in another. History tends to show what’s actually possible, and it perhaps keeps normative dreams in check. The same thing could be said about any stab at “theories of human nature” grounded in biology, such as Pinker’s work, or Edward. O. Wilson’s. If you don’t have a realistic theory of human nature, you tend to think that everything is possible.
It seems to me that without History and a hard-bitten theory of human nature the mind tends toward normative speculation. People like Robert Conquest would say the Scottish Enlightenment was grounded in theories of history and human nature in a way that the French Enlightenment was not. If you’re a cynic, you see where the argument is leading: The French Enlightenment led to the French Revolution, the Terror, and Napoleon.
It makes me crazy every time someone puts The Wealth of Nations or The Theory of Moral Sentiments on a list of “what you should read for an introduction to blank”. The books are important and very good in their ways but they are terrible for someone without a background and a lot of patience. Which means they are terrible for just about everyone the “what to read” list is for.
(Ditto for Aristotle.)
I’ve still never read much Aristotle. _Nicomachean ethics_ is not long. It’s dry.
I think we need a few questions before we recommend reading.
1. How many non-fiction books do you read in a year? Can you read without effort? Do you habitually stop watching videos of lectures because you read much faster than you can listen, and you can read large parts of the NYTimes almost effortlessly?
2. How much time do you really want to spend? How much free time do you have in a given week to allocate to this?
3. How smart are you, in a bookish sense? How curious? How motivated?
Sorry to keep nattering on. Most people don’t know their estimated IQ score–I don’t, though I’ve met people who say they do. Perhaps ask them their college board scores if they know them.
Can you read a short novel on a Saturday afternoon, getting halfway through in a fit of inattention?
Here’s a good question. “Do you consider Machiavelli’s _The Prince_ or de Tocqueville’s _Democracy in America_ to be an easy read?
There are psychometrician who can ask better questions. Another big problem is the issue of “crystalized” vs. “fluid” intelligence. There are smart people who simply don’t read much but teach themselves various skills, serially, without having a lot of the crystalized knowledge that comes from heavy discretionary reading or endless years of schooling. Hans Eysenck probably described it somewhere.
Strongly recommend the book “Confidence Games” by Mark C. Taylor
Law, really, is where economics and philosophy overlap most importantly. Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law, provides an excellent example. Much more than just law and economics, it addresses the positivism issue head on and cites an extensive list of economists including Adam Smith, Amartya Sen, Tyler Cowen, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Pigou, Paul Samuelson, Thomas Schelling and many more as well as more philosophers than you can shake a stick at: just the first page of As in the Index includes Lord Acton, William P. Alston, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle. Legal scholars, perhaps because of their immersion in the socratic method, tend have a better grasp of both philosophy and economics, than either economists or philosophers. And they are worth reading because law has perhaps the most real impact on the lives of more people than any other field of study outside of engineering or chemistry.